Access and Benefit Sharing

SITUATION

India is one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world. With just 2.4 per cent of the world’s land area, India’s biological richness is spread across a vast range of habitats and ecosystems. These support 7 per cent of globally recorded species, including over 45,000 plants and 91,000 animal species—out of which many are keystone and charismatic species. India’s rich biological heritage coexists with over 1.2 billion people and about one-sixth of the world’s livestock population. For millions of Indians, therefore, biodiversity supports their very livelihoods and way of life. Thus, protecting and maintaining India’s rich biodiversity and natural resources is essential for achieving inclusive and sustainable development.

India gained prominence as one of the leading countries, which signed the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992 and further adopted the Nagoya Protocol in 2014. This led to an early setup of a legal framework to ensure fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from utilisation of biological resources. The Indian Parliament enacted the Biological Diversity Act (BDA) in 2002 which is being implemented nationwide by the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) as well as through decentralised institutional structures like the State Biodiversity Boards (SBB) and the Biodiversity

APPROACH

ACHIEVEMENTS

• The project has developed communication strategy through Knowledge-Attitude-Practice (KAP) analysis of 10 key stakeholders in the ABS process which includes, the Biodiversity Management Committees (BMC), commercial users of biological resources, forest department, legal professionals etc. Several communication products have been developed as guided by the communication strategy.
• Methodology for Training of Trainers (ToT) for operationalisation of BMCs was pilot tested and 50 district trainers have been trained on various aspects of BMC functions and documentation of People’s Biodiversity Registers.
• Over 70 stakeholder-specific trainings and workshops have been conducted in three states with the participation of more than 2000 people from BMCs, district officials from forest, agriculture, horticulture, businesses, researchers etc.
• Good practice case studies of ABS from the use of biological resources from forests, agriculture, animal-based derivative (snake venom) have been developed to showcase the ABS process and to serve as models for ABS compliance.
• ABS- MS (monitoring system) for tracking the use of Indian Biological Resources has been established at NBA was launched on 22 May 2019 by the Hon’ble Vice- President of India. Pilot test run of the ABS-MS has identified about 300,000 users (research and patent) of Indian biological resources
• • The project has developed sector-specific guidance documents for ABS compliance which cover 5 sectors namely: academic research, AYUSH, biotechnology, cosmetics and seeds. This builds on the outcome of business dialogues conducted by the project in the year 2018 and 2019.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE AGENDA 2030

The ABS project supports the Indian partners in achieving the SDG 15 to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity through securing fair and equitable access and benefit sharing of biological resources. The project shows various interlinkages throughout the Agenda 2030 and therefore mirrors the integrated and indivisible spirit of the SDGs in the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental. Read more here.

RESOURCES

All brochure and movies of this project can be accessed via the Resources section on this website, by selecting the topic "Access and Benefit Sharing".

• To learn about the project activities visit our News from the Projects and Media Coverage section and selecting the topic "Access and Benefit Sharing".
• Find out more about our project sites visit our Where We Work section.
• Find our Partners and our Team under the Who We Are section